Share your feedback on the AI services experiment in Nightly

[asafko]

Hi folks, 

In the next few days, we will start the Nightly experiment which provides easy access to AI services from the sidebar. This functionality is entirely optional, and it’s there to see if it’s a helpful addition to Firefox. It is not built into any core functionality and needs to be turned on by you to see it. 

If you want to try the experiment, activate it via Nightly Settings > Firefox Labs (please see full instructions here). 

We’d love to hear your feedback once you try out the feature, and we’re open to all your ideas and thoughts, whether it’s small tweaks to the current experience or big, creative suggestions that could boost your productivity and make accessing your favorite tools and services in Firefox even easier.

Thanks so much for helping us improve Firefox!

[Crypticthree]

Please concentrate on being a good secure web browser. No one wants this. This is a waste of time and resources 

[littles0uls]

This!

[user8008s]

agreed!!

[Typhoon]

Agreed. AI feels antithetical to Firefox.

[Redcanary]

Best and easiest way to sum it up.

[Gugux]

In french it's "grosse merde"

For the rest I totally agree. AI is totally unneeded bull**bleep**. Please stick to doing a great fast and secure browser !

[uneevee]

Who tf does this benefit anyways?!?!

AI is unnecessary af in Firefox

[TheEaterOfBeans]

it keeps the Tumblr/Twitter people out, you can enjoy the feeling of superiority that comes with knowing that you use a browser that they AREN'T using

(and then you can just ignore the AI button because it's going to be useless)

[KiruTheManokit]

this!!!!!!!!

[Taleweaver]

AGREED. I avoid all the other big browsers because I don't want AI. Don't put it in Firefox too!

[lachlan_musicma]

Agree. There are places that ML has a place, but in Firefox isn't one of them - not yet anyway. Please spend your time developing needed - and wanted - fixes and features.

[PurgingSmuggler]

Precisely.

[vesper]

absolutely not i'd change browsers immediately

[bluecrow]

Agreed. Please don't.

[TheEaterOfBeans]

Counterpoint.
Technology good 🙂

[skulltaffy]

Counterpoint: technology is ultimately neutral, but the way you use it and what it affects contributes to whether it's good or evil. And Generative AI is evil with how much it destroys both people's livelihoods and the environment as a whole.

(Edited to rephrase my point in a cleaner fashion.)

[cloony]

No ai please, it is so useless and harms the internet as a whole and the environment. I actively avoid it and want to support systems that DO NOT use ai.

[NutterButter]

I had recently started seeing the little star popup on selection and it was getting in the way of right-clicking. Threw my muscle memory WAY off.

But more importantly; NO. Everything has "AI" now. If I select a phrase on the screen, would a google search be more appropriate to offer than a chat bot?

[NorthStar]

Agreed. So many things Mozilla could be focusing on to make FF better, actively making it a top class browser, and instead they're wasting it on AI, which is morally questionable in its application, violates privacy and copyright, eats huge amounts of resources, and generates garbage at best, and disinformation at worst. I am not anti-technology, I am anti-bad ideas. AI is a bad idea. It needs much more work and much heavier government regulation.

[Mte90]

The announcement is not clear that is not started yet.

Also it isn't clear if it will require a personal token for this services and what settings are available.

[Mardak]

Try checking Nightly for updates. It should be available with 2024-06-25 builds with settings dropdown choices of 4 providers. No personal token is necessary as the chatbot will reuse your usual tab's cookies if any, e.g., ChatGPT doesn't require a login and can reuse your login or subscription for GPT-4o "omni."

 

If you're comfortable with changing about:config, you can set "browser.ml.chat.provider" to any URL to open it in the sidebar, and if that page accepts passing in prompts with ?q=, the context menu functionality will work too. You can create your own prompts by adding a new String pref, e.g., "browser.ml.chat.prompts.a" set to "Tell me more"

 

[Mte90]

I can confirm that works 🙂

[Mte90]

The first thing that I notice that there isn't a way to close the vertical window...

The only way I found is to press Customize Sidebar that has an X so I can close the AI sidebar.

[Mardak]

Thanks for the feedback. You should be able to close it in today's Nightly with the new AI chatbot icon.

[Uberprutser]

I can close it, but I don't see how to get it back. But what the point of this sidebar?
This could be done with an extension. And I suggest you have a look how DDG annomizes chat. Because I prefer not to login with those "ai" companies.

But as long as I can easily disable the bs, and Mozilla gets a ton of money, it's acceptable. But that doesn't make it right!

[gloopsies]

Let me see if I understand this correctly: Firefox will read my browser cookies and take any OpenAI/Hugging face/whatever else tokens to use for the feature I never asked to be added to a "privacy focused" web browser?

[shakyjake]

---

@Mardak wrote:

No personal token is necessary as the chatbot will reuse your usual tab's cookies

---

CSRF as a Service? 😂

[marianoguerra]

will this be exposed for js developers? chrome canary experiments with gemini seem to expose a window.ai object you can use to use the capabilities from code.

if so please try to talk to each other and standardize an MVP 🙂

[Mardak]

This current chatbot experiment does not make use of LLM / chat completion-type APIs, but there's a path to building a more integrated Firefox chatbot powered by local or remote inference APIs that could be exposed to developers both for the web and add-ons.

[JHeuser]

Do not do this.

Leave ai out of my browser. If you want to make it put it in an extension. I'd still hate it but at least it won't be forced onto my PC.

[pookarah]

absolutely this. i get that there's probably people who've been asking for this, but please leave it as an official extension. I and many others have zero interest in it, and worry that it will impact the overall security and privacy of our firefox installs.

[soraka]

i absolutely do not want this. not as an extension, not in the browser. i think less of the company for even starting this process. you can and should end it now. generative ai is extremely unethical, with high environmental cost, scraping data usually without consent or compensation, and often unhelpful results.

[nousernames]

Exactly. You will lose so many of us if you pursue this.

[hadtoregister]

Oh no. Under what circumstances can Firefox be trusted at that point? How can we trust that it won't be given access to our usage data even if it's "turned off" (re: invisible to the user but still scraping data)? This just sounds like Google all over again.

[magentapuppy]

yeah keep adding this useless and privacy invasive stuff that *all* the big corps are doing, rather than adding features that actually differentiate it, particularly as a less 'BS' browser option 🙄

[Mardak]

We included chatbot providers like HuggingChat which says: "We endorse Privacy by Design. As such, your conversations are private to you and will not be shared with anyone, including model authors, for any purpose, including for research or model training purposes."

Additionally, if you don't want to use a remotely hosted chatbot, you could use one that's on-device so data doesn't leave your computer while getting the benefits of optional AI.

[lackey]

AI has myriad ethical and environmental issues behind it. The first two options offered by Mozilla are created by some of the most invasive, unethical, environmentally destructive companies in the AI space. Google and Microsoft are not known for being private, not even a little bit.

The general issues behind AI, and the fact companies like HuFace need to scrape data without consent or permission, makes me question their promise to keep the data I offer them private.

These new changes appear antithetical to the Mozilla Manifesto.

I believe Mozilla should cease their attempts to integrate AI into the browser, and to reevaluate the ethical implications of promoting these products by these companies.

[KTibow]

It's just another browser but in a sidebar. You can access "unethical" content with both browsers. It's not a big deal.

[Razorwire]

Your argument is based on whataboutism, which is a common logical fallacy.

- "Firefox shouldn't add an unethical feature"
- "But there's already unethical stuff on the Internet"

A company adding an unethical feature to their browser is (obviously) not equivalent to the browser being able to access unethical content not created by said company, and even if it was, how is "unethical things already exists" a point in favor of adding MORE unethical things?

Ridiculous argument.

[Lenyberry]

There is a massive difference between loading websites that contain unethical content (which is impossible to consistently differentiate in-browser for a BROWSER) and jamming unethical content into the browser itself. Don't play disingenuous strawman games.